Religion Dispatches
…ng their subsidies. But for Obama not to stand his ground and say that the cheap, low-level policies that many healthy people now have should be cancelled for the sake of the common good: that’s just inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s not getting a lot of help from his Democratic “friends” on this one, and for the same reason: They likewise don’t know how to speak ethically. Thus, Obama special friend Bill Clinton: “I personally believe, even if…
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…fans among the expo’s 40,000 visitors. “Some Christians Think We are Just Cheap Harlots” “A lot of guys pose for photos with us and when they go home and look up what’s on our T-shirts, they learn what we’re about,” Lobért explained to Telegraph reporter Philip Sherwell. “We call it booby-trapping.” But those who attend adult entertainment fairs aren’t exactly Lobért’s target audience. Her conspicuous appearance is also meant to attract the other…
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…he sentiments that Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, expressed in an interview for Progressive & Religious: I don’t want to be a part of anything anymore in my life that makes those boundaries barriers. I don’t want to be defined as right or left. I want to be defined as a Christian with the world in mind. The people who are really leaders are trying to move us all without internecine warfare into a ve…
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…Pride Walk. Colombia: Profile of trans musician and activist explores her spiritual life Sentiido profiles Sarah Gonzalez, a musician and transgender activist whose “spiritual life is linked to a deep respect for nature, an idea enriched by Buddhist and shamanic practices.” Sarah says that struggling with her identity, she prayed to the Virgin Mary to be “fixed,” before understanding that Catholic doctrine was standing in the way of an authentic…
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…on sola scriptura, with the faith that the words alone, guided by the Holy Spirit, would effect transformations in the lives of individuals. If there’s one thing that American Protestants are good at, it is mass producing and distributing religious material, be it Bibles (in this case), pamphlets, tracts, images of a white dude who is supposed to be Jesus, and so on and on. Numbers appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and vol…
Read More…rm. But the very notion that there could be much more grievous sins of the spirit seems never to have occurred to either of them. I don’t know or care whether Ted Cruz has cheated on his wife. My guess is that he has not. But the mistake he makes, and that his conservative Christian followers make, is to think that this kind of fidelity is somehow the gold standard of personal ethics, overlooking any problems related to higher-level double dealing…
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…n a neighborhood bar. But there it is: anything to get us into the holiday spirit. Soon it became evident that none of the other young Brooklynites around me (who were, informal polling later on revealed, entirely childless and, it was safe for the lecturer to assume, mostly godless as well) came for hard-hitting proof. When the promised proof never actually appeared, the crowd, as Cahn might have predicted, didn’t seem to mind. Baby Jesus’ Materi…
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…tic and saint and artist, all rolled up in one. She is an intellectual and spiritual at the same time and she has told me hair-raising stories that can’t be disputed, least of all by me. When we return, the next speaker, Greta Christina, is angry at religion and says that peaceful co-existence is impossible with believers. However, she says that atheists don’t want to dig up Jesus Christ just so they can crucify him all over again. The audience la…
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…nto this long conversation about reincarnation and I presented him with my reservations about such a thing. Something is left, namely the body, and as that disintegrates small creatures make use of the bits and pieces and in that sense it’s reincarnated, but there isn’t anything else, some nonphysical thing that has feelings and thoughts and memories and personality that goes into the little critters or into a person. What gets transferred from pa…
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…ness in and for a denomination that has lost its way.” Regardless of those reservations, 10A is now the law of Presbyterian land. What lessons can be drawn from this success? Learning from Failure Amendment 10A is the culmination of years of tweaking and learning from past failures. After a 1997 attempt to replace “fidelity” and “chastity” with language about living with “integrity,” advocates spent a few years pursuing a strategy of deleting t…
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